You already know that fluorescent lights save energy. You know that they burn cool and don’t add heat to the room. This reduces the air conditioning load in your house and also reduces the risk of fire when used in tight spaces like closets. But you hate the cold, blue light they give off. You don’t like the sickly color your skin has when seen under fluorescent lights. Your clothes don’t look right. Do the greys look like the tans? You’ve tried the “warm white” fluorescents and they make everything look too pink.

    You’re in luck. There is now a solution. (more…)

    I have been engaged in a discussion on an on-line forum of residential architects in which we are debating what good design is and what our profession should do about it. It has been my contention that we have negatively influenced public opinion about architects be creating an elitist image of ourselves. I would like to see this change. I would like to see more architects designing more houses and becoming a positive influence on good house design.

    Here’s what I posted today. I thought you might be interested. (more…)

    Sub-Zero, Liebherr, GE Monogram, and other “cabinet depth,” built-in refrigerators are increasingly popular in the high-end market. These refrigerators provide a number of desirable features, such as humidity controlled compartments, specially controlled drawers for fine-tuning the temperature for delicate foods, snack drawers, and independent compressors for the freezer and the refrigerator so that there is no shared air between the two chambers. However, I think the greatest appeal is the fact that these refrigerators are the same depth as the lower kitchen cabinets.

    Ordinary refrigerators are six or eight inches deeper than the lower cabinets and countertop causing them to stick out into the room, thus ruining the lines of the kitchen design and just plain getting in the way. A built-in type unit will sit back more, with its doors flush with the other cabinets so they become less obtrusive. Each manufacturer offers several models that have doors you can cover with panels that match your other cabinetry. This is what you see in showplace kitchens. (more…)

    When you mention wood floors to most people, they conjure up an image of a narrow board, red oak floor. But times have changed. Now there are many, many choices of board width and species. And many of these choices come at a modest cost increase. I’ve used white oak, antique chestnut oak, antique heart pine, santos mahogany, jatoba (aka Brazilian cherry), Australian cypress, cumaru, lyptus, and other species you may not have ever heard of. The range of color choices and grain patterns is impressive. (more…)

I happened to run across HGTV’s Dream House 2009. Here it is.

The outside looks nice, but the plans are pretty bad. (more…)

    Here’s a photo from famous Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, California. This was the site of this year’s U.S. Open golf championship, famously won by Tiger Woods who played on an injured knee. Not only did he have ligament damage in his left knee, Woods had stress fractures he had not mentioned. Still he played on and eventually won the biggest tournament of the year on a course that meant so much to him.

    His knee wasn’t the only thing that was out of whack at Torrey Pines. Check out the brickwork on the masonry posts around the first tee. It reminds me of Tiger’s pained follow through on some of his shots! (more…)

    Here is a little tip to keep in mind when you are selecting a tile floor for your shower. Make sure the tile is relatively small. The reason might not seem obvious at first. A shower floor needs to have a slope so the water will flow toward the drain. Puddles in a shower floor are a slipping hazard and mold will grow in the puddle quite quickly. Generally, the drain is placed in the center of the floor to create an even slope from each wall to the drain. (more…)

    Do you have a clear vision of the perfect house for you and your family?

    If you are like most people, your vision of your dream house is actually an idea without much in the way of concrete details. It may consist of mental images of houses you admire or remember. You may have merely a sense of what it should be, but no clear image of it in a physical way. This is normal. No architect expects you to come to his or her office with a design. After all, that’s what the architect’s job is. You’ve got to give you architect a chance to earn his or her money! (more…)

    Radon is back in the news. Radio personality Paul Harvey, the New York Times, and other news outlets reported recently that granite countertops pose a threat of emitting radon gas. Radon gas has been purportedly linked to risk of lung cancer. The Marble Institute of America has responded with a scholarly report essentially saying that the radon emissions from granite are so miniscule that they warrant no fears.

    It seems that this report surfaces every ten years, or so. It has been promoted by the makers of competing countertop materials, like quartz products like Cambria or Silestone and solid surfaces like Corian. You can read and listen to the reports for yourself, but it seems to me that this is a Chicken Little issue that grabs the media’s attention and the stone countertop industry then has to spend lots of time and money de-bunking it. (more…)

    I had a client ask me about light switch type, color and what I thought about dimmers.

    One question was whether or not the Decora style switches, those are the ones with a wider, flatter, rocker type of switch, were “expected” in a high-end house. I told them that I have some clients who like the Decora switches, but I could not say it is the majority opinion. I don’t think there is any expectation of them in a high-priced house. (more…)